The Dawn of a New Constructive Era 117 



on the other hand is profoundly significant, a general tendency 



to increase being noticed from the year 1907, when 31,815,900 



head of swine were inspected, to the year 1916, when 40,482,799 



were inspected, an increase of almost nine million head. Sheep, 



on the other hand, show an increase to the year 1914, when 14,- Hogs Prevent 



958,834 were inspected, from which time the decrease has been Serious Meat 



pronounced, a total of 11,985,926 being reported for the last fiscal 



year, as against 9,681,876 in 1907. The total number of animals 



inspected at slaughter has increased from 50,935,216 in 1907 to 



62,101,391 in 1916, 77.62 per cent of this being due to the increase 



in swine slaughterings. 



Up to the outbreak of the great war, our population was in- 

 creasing at the rate of twenty-five per cent per decade. The sig- 

 nificance of these figures is therefore apparent. There is no doubt 

 that our producers of beef cattle are doing everything which is 

 economically possible at the present time to increase the output, 

 but they have not yet overcome the effects of the depression of 

 ten years ago. The increase in pork production, which has been 

 rapid during the last ten years, is all that has saved the country 

 from a most serious meat shortage. The per capita consumption 

 of meat in the United States has actually decreased during this 

 time. Any head of a family on a moderate income can bear wit- 

 ness to this fact. 



The entire problem is an economic one. Confining our atten- 

 tion solely to beef and pork production, we may observe that 

 hogs are much more economical animals to produce on the farm 

 than beef cattle. The classic investigations of Lawes and Gilbert 

 showed that a steer required 777 pounds of digestible organic 

 matter to make 100 pounds of increase in live weight, whereas a 

 pig required only 353 pounds of digestible matter to make a sim- 

 ilar gain. Expressed in another way, Jordan has shown that the p- R„,v/,,n 

 pig returns 25 pounds of marketable product for each one hun- 

 dred pounds of digestible matter consumed, of which 15.6 pounds 

 are edible solids, whereas a steer returns only 8.3 pounds of mar- 

 ketable product, of which only 2.8 pounds are digestible solids. 

 This greater economy of production for feed consumed accounts 

 for the large increase in pork production on the high-priced lands 

 of the corn belt, while beef production there has been almost at 

 a standstill. 



Cattle, however, are a necessity in economical farm manage- 

 ment, when large quantities of unmarketable roughage are pro- 



